Advice from ‘Butt In The Chair’ Experts

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I needed someone wise in my ear this month and a few words of inspiration. Found some!

From Joe Fassler’s interviewing 150 writers:

First Sentence

“The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text,” William Gibson said. Stephen King described spending “weeks and months and even years” working on first sentences, each one an incantation with the power to unlock the finished book. And Michael Chabon said that, once he stumbled on the first sentence of Wonder Boys, the rest of the novel was almost like taking dictation. “The seed of the novel—who would tell the story and what it would be about—was in that first sentence, and it just arrived,” he said.

Sound It Out.

“Plot can be overrated. What I strive for more is rhythm,” the late Jim Harrison said. “It’s like taking dictation, when you’re really attuned to the rhythm of that voice.” George Saunders described a similar process . . .
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Success: Ruin Meals. Write 5th Grade Prose.

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Author Louise Penny has ruined me for any restaurant or pub memories I used to cherish. What’s more, she may have ruined every attempt to enjoy future restaurant meals, no matter how much I might be willing to pay.

Nothing anyone serves me can measure up to the food in her novels. I’ve read most of Penny’s books. The food in them is literally to die for.

Instead of a book page I want a flaky, just-out-of-the-oven croissant stuffed with chunks of maple-baked ham and melted Gruyere wafting out fresh rosemary, and I want it next to crisp Pommes frites with the Bistro’s homemade mayonnaise.

And that is just what she feeds her cops for lunch . . .

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Pithy. Pithy. Pithy! (am so eager for more of it …)

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Are you, like me, pining for the world to get a bit more … Pithy?

A pithy phrase or statement is brief but full of substance and meaning. It often feels like a shot of truth.

(I don’t mean a hit of social media that assumes humans’ attention spans are shorter than a cream shot hitting expresso.)

Can a fiction writer be pithy? Use the pithy phrase successfully and not lose readers? Avoid that moment when readers feel an author reaching through to lecture … or (I’m cringing) hector them?

Wow them with that arresting moment that might define a character and have us thinking about a possible truth long after a page is turned?

Yes! Of course. But, like me, it might be surprising.

I’ve been listening to Agatha Christie’s short stories as I drive. The pithy is jumping out at me in the midst of bodies and more bodies, and even more bodies (and lots of stolen jewels).

So here she is. . . .

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